Tim Powers ama:

I sort of treat the research as clues in a detective story – like I’ve got to figure out what was really going on. And sometimes – as with Russia! – it turns out that “what was really going on” is contrary to what appeared to be going on. As for the Yom Kippur War – I figured the Mossad would like to have that war turn out not to be so costly, not such a close call. I find the historical period (or character, or place) first, just because it’s something intriguing, and then I read everything I can find on it, hoping to find those suggestive little unexplained or implausible details. And when I’ve got a good handful of those, I try to figure out what supernatural back-story would explain them. It’s kind of a screwed-up version of the scientific method!

This is maybe the most science-fictional headline I’ve ever seen: Government Lab Reveals It Has Operated Quantum Internet for Over Two Years. The article says things like:

once at the hub, they are converted to conventional classical bits and then reconverted into quantum bits to be sent on the second leg of their journey.

If someone told me about this, I’d have taken it about as seriously as “AI just around the corner” or “quantum computer renders all encryption obsolete.” “Cold fusion is finally here!” I’d have taken more seriously.

The article’s short on details, but I think I get the gist of it: your computer’s quantum network card randomly generates a one-time pad with quantum-entangled pairs of particles whose wave function collapses when half of them hit the quantum router. The one-time pad can’t be eavesdropped upon, because there isn’t anything to eavesdrop on because quantum physics is freakin’ magic. Then for the lifetime of the connection, both sides use this one-time pad to encrypt their traffic, which is sent conventionally.

Since the message is decrypted at the router, it’s only that first leg of the trip that’s über-secure; things are normal for the rest of your traffic’s trip.

In the article’s comments, jckrumm wins the quantum internet:

After two years, they were using their quantum internet mostly to exchange pictures of Schrödinger’s cat.

My five year old son asked me last week “what do you see through the black circles in my eyes when you’re controlling me when I’m at school?”

Reddit asks: What is the creepiest thing your young child has ever said to you?

One could wear a different t-shirt featuring H.P. Lovecraft or inspired by his works every day for years without repetition.

Cafe Press: Cthulhu t-shirt: 1477 results Lovecraft t-shirt: 1159 results

Zazzle: 746 results Cthulhu t-shirt: 1035 results

Red Bubble: Cthulhu t-shirt: 676 results Lovecraft t-shirt: 801 results

Spreadshirt: Cthulhu t-shirt: 60 results Lovecraft t-shirt: 27 results

In the above, there are some false positives and generally a huge amount of overlap between the two categories.

HP Lovecraft Historical Society: 15 t-shirts

Arkham Bazaar: about 60 t-shirts

T-short Bordello: 8 t-shirts

I could keep going, but you can see the diminishing returns.

So it’s kind of striking that last month Lovecraft Holdings, founded 2009, has filed for a standard character mark for “H.P. Lovecraft” on clothing, including “sweat bands, ear muffs, aprons, scarves, bandanas, belts, suspenders, neckwear, ties, underwear, briefs, bras, socks, robes, underclothes, pajamas, sleepwear, night gowns, nighties, lingerie, hosiery, tights, gloves, mittens, rain slickers”. Just filed, the USPTO hasn’t examined the filing yet.

IP law is a quagmire, so I’m sticking with “striking” rather than so much as speculating on what the consquences would be if it’s granted.

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while – on Ebay, for $30 shipped you can get a DVD Box set that includes Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, Kiki’s Delivery Service and more. There’s a similar set with slightly different contents. (So far as I can tell these are legit.)

And this weekend at the Pacific East Mall in Richmond, I saw this catbus with Totoro passengers.

At 7 AM at her school, a 16-year-old student in Florida with good grades and no history as a trouble-maker mixed toilet bowl cleaner with aluminum foil in an 8 oz. water bottle, creating an explosion so violent it caused the top to pop right off! And made some smoke! But the injury count and damage rate was… zero.

So, naturally, she was expelled and arrested on felony charges for which she’s to be tried as an adult.

I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a geek of my generation who didn’t do stupider shit than this. Numerous scientists and engineers have spoken out about some of their stupid shit. I take the fifth.

We’ve got to stop the insanity.

My twitter feed has a bunch of references to banned science fiction and fantasy books. There are often breathless articles about books being banned, usually during Banned Books Week. And nearly invariably, the “ban” comprises a community challenge to a book’s use in a given curriculum or its presence in a public library – and often the challenge wasn’t even successful. The whole story was… people argued about whether a particular book was appropriate in a particular public, tax-funded context.

I’m here to say that this is a feature. The public is made out of people, and people should argue about what books public institutions are advancing or public funds are supporting. I daresay some of the same people shaking their heads in disgust about challenges to To Kill a Mockingbird or Brave New World would quickly discover the virtue of banning books if some school board somewhere introduced to a curriculum some current white supremacist novel encouraging hate crimes, or a teacher was explaining The 120 Days of Sodom to 9-year-olds.

There’s plenty to disagree with in given motivations for challenging books, or in given ideas of what’s appropriate for different age groups. And that’s why arguing about these things is a good thing.

There are a lot of people extremely dedicated to the premise that the person or persons responsible for the Boston Marathon bombs are one or more of: Arab, Muslim, foreign nationals, members of or sympathizers with Al-Qaeda. And there are some as dedicated to the premise that the person or persons are one or more of: white, domestic, right-wing, homophobic.

At least one of them must be wrong.

I’m sure everyone will be gracious about admitting their surety was erroneous and premature when we finally actually know something.

Kickstarter has made for a golden age for dice. I’m hoping to receive this month a huge pile of dice in all sorts of strange shapes, and I’m still waiting for these and a couple of sets of these fudge dice. (Fudge dice are six-sided dice with two sides blank, two +’s and two -’s, thrown four at a time for Fudge or Fate games – basically, it’s 4d3-8.)

Ending tomorrow is a kickstarter for these adorable rocket dice, and this Sunday night (Pacific time) the kickstarter for these precision machined metal gaming dice concludes. I had considered the creator’s previous precision machined dice kickstarter, but I thought the sharp edges would make them functionally unusable – they won’t roll well unless you have a handy craps table to throw them down, or a dice tower with steep ramps; they’d damage tables; the edges for a soft metal like aluminum would be so fragile you’d have to be careful to keep them from so much as knocking into each other. The chamfered edges on the dice in the current project are just what I wanted.

If you want still yet more fudge dice, there’s a project to create translucent ones and the publisher of Fate Core is making what they’re calling Fate dice.

There are pretty dice in wood and metal and these cool dice whose centers float freely within an exterior cage.

This guy is going to have his hands full.

I was thinking about role-playing game dice mechanics, today. I knew I remembered having heard of a system in which you rolled a pool of d6’s and the result was either the highest die, or, if you rolled more than one of some number, you got that number +1 for each additional die in the set. So 2 6’s or 3 5’s would count as a 7.

I googled “dice mechanic 3 5’s is 7. The second result’s quoted text said “In Orcworld [sic], 3 6’s is an 8, but 3 5’s and a 6 is a 7 (5+2).”

Orkworld I’ve barely heard of; I was probably thinking of Silhouette, the system underlying Tribe 8, where only 6’s are treated that way. The result page’s previous sentence is “In Silhouette, only 6’s do that, so a roll of 3 6’s is an 8, but a 6 and 3 5’s is a 6.” so I got both the system I was thinking of and a system that really worked the way my search described.

My email filter has four levels of spamminess: good, borderline, spam, and null (for the spammiest spam-spam-spam.) At least a couple of times a week, something I want ends up in spam. So I check it out every so often. This is a pain because there’s so much garbage. So I struck on a scheme to send more stuff that was ending up in spam straight to null: if more than half of the from or subject lines are non-ASCII, they go to null. My email filter: now 85% more provincial!

So I noodled around with Perl on the command line until I got this:

perl -MEmail::Folder -e 'use Encode qw(decode); $f=Email::Folder->new(shift @ARGV); for my $m ($f->messages) { $_=decode("Mime-header",$m->header("subject")); $a=()=/\p{ascii}/g; $l=length; $r = $l ? $a/$l : 0; print sprintf "% 3d % 3d %.2f %s\n", $a, $l, $r, $_ }' spam 

which became this in the filter script:

sub ascii_ratio {
  my $str = shift;
  return 0 unless length $str;
  my $num_ascii =()= $str =~ /\p{ASCII}/g;
  return $num_ascii / length $str;
}

my $from = decode("Mime-header", $email->header('from'));
my $subject = decode("Mime-header", $email->header('subject'));

if (ascii_ratio($from) < .5 or ascii_ratio($subject) < .5) {                                                        
$email->accept("/home/zed/Mail/IN.null");                                                                         
exit;                                                                                                             
} 

Notice that ‘ascii’ in the one-liner became ‘ASCII’ in the script. That’s because I developed the one-liner in perl 5.16 and am running the script on perl 5.10, and in 5.10, Unicode Character Property names are case-sensitive but in 5.12+, they’re not. Yay.

There is a Philip K. Dick role-playing game. Sometimes, I’m just astonished that things that seem so narrowly attuned to my tastes could possibly exist. This is one of those.

It doesn’t call itself a PKD RPG, per se. It says

Left Coast is a game about science fiction authors like Philip K. Dick and L. Ron Hubbard living in California at a blurry point between the Summer of Love and Reaganomics.

In the game, some of you will play the Authors, some of you play the friends and slackers surrounding them, demanding their attention, … and some of you play the weird alien forces conspiring to invade the Author’s lives. Together you’ll create a short story about Authors who struggle to control their lives so they can focus on doing the thing they love. Each author scrabbles for their big break, while dealing with their own financial incompetence, the screw-ups of their friends, and with their extremely creative minds slowly unspooling.

And each author is also trapped inside a novel that’s being written by one of their friends –who is making weird things invade their life. […]

The second half of VALIS and the first half of Radio Free Albemuth, by Philip K. Dick are near-perfect examples of Left Coast stories.

But it’s hard for me to see it as anything else but the PKD RPG.

My gaming group played the quickstart version. It featured strange loops with different times superimposed on each other, a hostile voice berating the author from anything nearby with a speaker, the Author’s obsessed stalker fan and rival academic colleague cum spurned lover turning out to really be the same person, psychic alien invaders, and a Russian kosmonaut from one of the Author’s stories appearing in the real world.

Will play again.

I haven’t read any Dick or Dickiana for a long time, but I picked up What If Our World is Their Heaven? not long ago. After playing Left Coast, I promptly ordered I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick and The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (I already had the older In Pursuit of VALIS: Selections from the Exegesis).

Unrelated PKD anecdotes:

A few years ago I read Bishop’s Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas (sadly, my copy has the much worse title, “The Secret Ascension”.) It was published in 1987 and is set in a contemporary world featuring the overturn of the 22nd Amendment, Nixon continuing to be the sitting president, and Vietnam having become the 51st U.S. state. Watchmen, which began publication in September, 1986, is set in a contemporary world featuring the overturn of the 22nd Amendment, Nixon continuing to be the sitting president, and Vietnam having become the 51st U.S. state. I find it interesting that Bishop and Moore, whom I presume were writing these works at about the same time, struck on so many common elements.

At a PKD panel at Worldcon a couple of years, an audience member asked a question about Dick’s drug use. A writer on the panel who’d been a friend of Dick’s was quick to say it had been massively exagerrated, and sought to set the story straight, saying without irony, “Well, he used snuff all the time. And he drank – there was a lot of scotch. And he’d smoke pot if someone else had it – if it was around. And there were the amphetamines, but those were by prescription. So were the anti-depressants. And he dropped acid, but only twice. But that was it!”

English translation of a 140,000 word Russian novel telling the Lord of the Rings from a Mordorian perspective, not authorized by Gondor or the Tolkien Estate. The latter has scarier lawyers, so get it while you can: PDF epub or mobi.

Bonus: Gandalf Problem Solving – A Flowchart

I’ve had gadget lust for the Kindle DX since it first came out in 2009, so being the bleeding-edge alpha geek that I am, I finally bought a used Kindle DX Graphite on Ebay, some months after it was discontinued.

Good: 3G, big screen, New Oxford American Dictionary, hackable Android device.

Bad: No wifi, no SD card slot, discontinued (the latest Kindle firmware upgrade left the DX in the cold.)

Ugly: heavy, gives Amazon too much access when 3G is on, dextrocentric controls (which don’t inconvenience me personally, but I still don’t like them.)

The screen is almost 5.5” x 8”, about the size of a typical trade paperback. A big inspiration to buy it was to read some of the 6”x9” RPG PDFs I have, which are generally terrible on smaller e-readers. I’ve tried a few, and they work okay, but the text is pretty small – I need to look into pre-processing the PDFs to trim the margins. I’ve heard any number of accounts of people reading letter-size PDFs on the Kindle DX, but that’s clearly a game for someone with pre-presbyopic eyes (unless you turn the Kindle sideways and look at half-a-page at a time.)

After a long time of stubbornly refusing to buy DRM-ed e-books, I gave in and subscribed to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, whose digital subscription rate of $12 a year really is a tremendous bargain (and it’s Amazon-exclusive.)

I don’t like the idea of content whose continued availability is dependent on the continued availability of some proprietary platform, and I don’t like the idea of having my only copy of something be somewhere Amazon can delete it, so I did the obvious. I web-searched ‘strip Kindle DRM’, and downloaded and installed Calibre and the DRM removal plugins for it, and after a total of about 10 minutes, had a DRM-free copy. This wasn’t a rigged demo: I didn’t know exactly how to strip the DRM in advance, just that it was possible, straightforward, and easily found through web-searching. It’s almost as if DRM does more to inconvenience paying customers than it does to prevent duplication.

I’ve written before about my love for Paperbackswap. I’ve made a tiny bit of use of their sister site Swapacd, and I knew Swapadvd existed, but I hadn’t used it… until recently. I was looking at a small stack of DVDs I meant to get rid of, and finally the obvious occurred to me.

As with PBS (Paperbackswap), the simplifying assumption is that all DVDs are of equal value – send someone a box set with 6 DVDs and you get 6 credits. The wish list is more complicated than with PBS, where it’s a straightforward queue based on who requested it first. You prioritize your Swapadvd list, and can gain or lose ground in the queue based on how you’ve prioritized it. Maybe you wished for it longer ago, but someone else can get it first because they loved it more.

A DVD costs only a couple of dollars to mail, so sending one is comparable to what a rental used to be.

Some things I’ve received: Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, three seasons of Supernatural, Stardust, Taxi Driver, Pan’s Labyrinth. I’m currently waiting for the first two seasons of Arrested Development. And when I’m done with things I can flip them so they don’t just clutter up the house.

I took Frankenweenie on DVD out of the library. But it’s from Disney. Some recent Disney DVDs use a DRM scheme called ARccOS that Sony claimed was fully compatible with available DVD players and drives, but isn’t; others use something called X-project. Either way, it wouldn’t play on my HTPC.

So I had to take it to my desktop, and use HandBrake to rip a copy so I could watch it, incidentally making a copy of the movie. I’ll delete it when I’m done, but, still: wanted to just play the dvd, couldn’t do it without making a copy due to the stupid efforts to keep me from making the copy I didn’t want.

A long time ago, I used to maintain by hand a web page listing the books I’d read. Well, I’ve been doing the same lately on goodreads.com. There’s also a currently reading list, that keeps growing as I pick up another collection or anthology or other thing that lends itself to occasional reading.

I really like the ease of method chaining in ruby. When I create complicated shell pipelines, especially when there’s a perl one-liner involved, I’ve often wished I could do something ruby-ish. I’m not the first.

• Rubsh
• Fresh
• Rubish
• Rush
• DiaShell
• Urchin

While any number of the examples for use of the above might be a little easier and more concise than the equivalent in bash, none of them are consistently enough so for it to be terribly compelling to switch…

This is King Cotton. He’s a very friendly neighborhood stray whom we feed when he shows up, like Malasada did two nights ago.

Last night, as we got home…

M: No King?

Z: He’s not going to show up every night.

M: But I thought we had something.

Z: No, you were just a foodie call.

My venerable HP Laserjet 1012 gave up the ghost this weekend. I replaced it with a spiffy new Brother HL-2270DW. It’s noticeably faster, capable of higher resolution (not that I have any need for better than 600x600), and has a wireless feature I haven’t tried to use because it’s sitting next to a computer.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

The D in DW is for duplex. It can print on both sides of a sheet of paper. I remember being excited about a duplex printer for under $300 back in 2001; not the first time I wanted such a thing, but the first time it seemed within reach.

At various points in the meantime, I’ve tried manual duplexing – printing the odd pages in reverse order and putting them back in to print the even. I sang the praises of gnome-manual-duplex with automated this to the extent possible.

And I’ve probably wasted as much paper as I’ve saved in the process. As the printer got hot from printing a stack of pages, the chances of it grabbing two pages at once grew, and then everything thereafter was wrecked. To fight that, I’d print in small batches. But even when it worked, it was a pain in the butt, requiring running into the next room to reload the printer for each stack.

Duplex has been thoroughly in reach for a while row. The HL-2240D gets down to $60 on sale. But it seemed so hard to justify while the 1012 was still working.

And maybe that was a bad call, because watching it suck the paper back in to print a perfect double-sided page almost makes me cry, it’s so beautiful.

M: There’s no place in Berkeley where you can get Italian cookies like you can get on the east coast.

Z: Sure there is – the Virginia Bakery is an Italian-style bakery.

M: No, they wouldn’t have those.

8 YEARS LATER

M: Hey, do you remember when I said you couldn’t get Italian cookies in Berkeley, and you told me the Virginia Bakery had them, and I said they didn’t?

Z: Yeah.

M: Well, I finally went to the Virginia Bakery. And they have them!

Z: Mm-hmm.

M: Why didn’t you tell me you were right?!

Z: …

A while back, I blogged about a patent rejected due to prior art in a Carl Barks comic.

I’m reading Only a Poor Old Man, Fantagraphics’ Uncle Scrooge reprint, and see that Barks anticipated the premise of The Gods Must Be Crazy by some decades. In Uncle Scrooge #6 from June, 1954, in the story Tralla La, Scrooge McDuck drops a bottle cap from a plane (instead of a bottle, as in Gods) into a Shangri-La-esque valley in the Himalayas where its scarcity wreaks havoc on an isolated society used to there being plenty of everything for everyone.

The Dreams in the Lich House blog’s Blogthulhu category has some good articles on writing Cthulhoid RPG scenarios, most interesting of which is Mapping the Investigation Like a Dungeon on making a graphic representation of a scenario and what can be learned from it.